UKATC Engineers spark NASA Engineer's Curiosity

On Friday 19th April Nagin Cox, a senior engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in California, visited the Royal Observatory Edinburgh and was treated
to a whistle-stop tour of some of the work carried out by the UKATC. Ms Cox,
who works on the NASA Mars Science Laboratory rover 'Curiosity', is in the
UK as part of a 3 country speaking tour whilst Mars is in conjunction (behind
or close to) the Sun and work with Curiosity is not possible because radio
communications are disrupted.

Nagin enjoyed a tour of the Crawford Laboratory, where she heard from UKATC
engineers about their work on image slicing units for the Mid Infrared Instrument
for the James Webb Space Telescope and KMOS for the Very Large Telescope. We
also explained our adaptive optics research, demonstrated our robotics and
fibre optics projects for multi-object studies, and the Innovation group described
their activities on Earth observation projects such as Cubesats and an instrument
to be carried on a NASA Global Hawk Unmanned Aerial Vehicle.